


Where you go

by dev_chieftain



Series: Time enough for everything [2]
Category: Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Gen, sequelitis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-12
Updated: 2012-12-12
Packaged: 2017-11-20 23:05:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,825
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/590657
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dev_chieftain/pseuds/dev_chieftain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sequel to "Seen it Coming":</p><p>Kozmotis Pitchiner is given a second chance.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Where you go

He wakes slowly, in the rapid staccato maelstrom of a light rain, and everything is gray. 

On every inhalation, there is a tickling ache, just below his throat. It feels like something is caught there, and he coughs, but nothing comes free, nothing spills out of his mouth, not even spittle. Above is the muffled sound of the rain, thunderous somehow and faraway all at once, slap slap slapping the canopy above him sluggishly, a steady stream, a drizzle. He is aware of being cold, tries to curl in on himself, though it is a numb sort of cold that he only half-notices. 

Pine. He smells pine, pitch, and the thought of his name thrills panic up his spine. 

Unwisely, he sits up, head hitting the fern roof that had shielded him from the rainfall, penetrating the low curtain of leafy fronds that had protected him from the onslaught. His body protests, aching, stinging, screaming all up his back and around his neck in muscle spasms, in feverish itchy abrasions on his shoulders and his skull. Droplets spill into his eyes and sink into his hair, pleasantly cool against a scalp that feels a little too warm, feverish, raw. Soil and pine needles cling to his skin, his back, his face, and he blinks until his eyes are clear. 

The world is gray, and green, and curiously vivid. 

Under the weird shade of a tree for which Kozmotis has forgotten the name, there lurks a slender shape, wisp thin and white against the gray of the world around him. Where Kozmotis is cold, getting colder, somehow Jack Frost manages to look uncomfortably hot, as though it were a tropical rainforest and not some wintry desert that they found themselves in. Kozmotis looks about wildly until he realizes that he does know this place. This is Sonora's desert, the bed of life in the maw of the Valley of Death. The tree where Jack Frost slouches still does not belong here, exactly: it has a look about it, like it hails from the Sahara. But he knows where he is. He knows who he is. 

Jack Frost watches him, eyes half lid and face a mask of casual disinterest, under the flush of sweat and heat that this middle ground temperature brings them. He would look miserable, if he would deign to acknowledge the way his hair is clinging to his face.

Kozmotis remembers everything. Or, if not everything, everything important. He is ancient, and he is incomplete without the nightmares, and Jack Frost has taken them from him. 

And he is afraid. 

"Jack?" he asks at last, his voice a raspy, pitiful thing that sounds ugly and shrewish amidst the symphony of the rainfall. All arraigned beyond them are pine trees along the hills that become low, ancient mountains, the further one goes north. Here, the Earth is red and rusty, deep and dark in the shimmer of the rain. The gray is fading off, as Kozmotis's eyes adjust to the light, revealing that the gray soft filter of the heavens lets the Earth flourish in lurid, beautiful color. The sky is purple with storm, rich indigo with thick, black clouds. They rain with fervid purpose, drawing sweet life out of the mountains, and pale, blue-silver bushes bloom with bright yellow flowers, clustered on the hills. They are too far north for creosote bushes, for sweet honeyed ocotillo flowers, for saguaro and barrel cacti with their stark and alien spines. 

No reaction flickers over Jack Frost's face, though he sits up a trifle straighter, and lifts his crook. 

It swings about, huge and emanating a chill so sharp that Kozmotis's teeth chatter uncomfortably when it hovers near his face. He can feel his nose burning with the cold. He flinches away, backing up through the little weedy fronds that had shielded him in his sleep, until his back hits a scraggly pine tree. "What do you want?" Kozmotis whispers, yelping when the crook persists, touching his face, brushing up against his cheek. 

"Hold still," Jack says, in that same, soft voice he used before, and ice crawls out of the staff and into Kozmotis's face. It surges like a living thing in fingers and wreaths, until it crawls up to reach the hot-strange ache on his skull, silencing the faint feverish itch of it in an instant. Satisfied, Jack brings his crook back to rest on his knees, and sits back against his own tree, closing his eyes. The frost does not linger on Kozmotis's cheek, dripping away into nothing; but the heat does not come back on his head, and gradually his thoughts seem to find an order that he had not known he was missing. 

They sit together for an hour, until the rain's light drizzle eases away into a low, long, whispering mist, hissing down through the leaves in gusts of wind that rustle the trees for miles around. There is something tremendously peaceful about it. The smell of wet stone and soil and happy plants is overpowering. 

Jack Frost cracks open one eye, then the other, and hops to his feet, perching on his staff and gazing intently down at Kozmotis again, seeming to analyze him, crossed arms on knees, and lips pressed into his forearms, hidden. His eyes are huge and darker than Kozmotis remembers. 

"What do I call you?" 

He has grown so accustomed to being silently stared at, and not spoken to, that he is frightened for a moment at the faint little fluttering sound of Jack's voice again. Heart racing, Kozmotis puts his hand over his chest, and tries to catch his breath. "Pitch-- Pitch is fine."

Lifting his chin, Jack frowns, seeming to weigh the word before he agrees to it. "How do you feel?"

He wants to say, terrified!, but it doesn't fit, not quite. They have sat here for most of an afternoon, now, watching the rain fall over the desert, and he has only been frightened for moments at a time, if that. So, instead, Kozmotis says, "What are you going to do with me?"

Brow furrowing, Jack tilts his head to the side, seeming confused by the lack of direct answer to his question. He is, Kozmotis supposes, still out of practice with communicating, anymore. That is Kozmotis's fault, like so many other things. "Nothing," Jack Frost says, after a brief moment to consider it. "Why?"

Daunted by the challenge of explaining the magnitude of what he's done, regardless of whether it had been Kozmotis, at that point, or something else that spoke though him, he subsides into silence, instead turning to stare out at the setting sun. It is only partially visible through the cloud cover, but what does show is lovely, a prism etched out of the sky. 

Kozmotis does not know why, but something deep aches, and his eyes sting. He shuts them, and turns away. 

"Pitch," Jack says, his voice much closer, as a weight no heavier than a light-footed cat settles on Kozmotis's left thigh. He tries to freeze where he sits, startled, and when cold fingers touch his face, Kozmotis pulls back again, slamming his ice-coated head into the bark of the tree behind him with a grunt of annoyance. Jack winces slightly, the ghost of a smile catching his lips for a moment, his brow pulled tight in a slightly sympathetic expression. It's gone as quickly as it had come, but Jack does not touch Kozmotis's cheeks again, resting his hands on his knees instead. He perches there, nimble feet easily balancing his weight on Kozmotis's thigh, crouched low enough that they can look each other in the eye, and waits until he finally grows bored, and says: "Look at me?"

Out of fear, Kozmotis does. A softer smile, almost wan, flickers over Jack Frost's face at even that simple thing, but he does not linger on it.

"Why are you afraid of me?"

Kozmotis does not have an answer, so he simply says, "I don't know." After a moment, he adds, "I suppose I'm expecting you to be angry about what I did to you. Not that I would blame you. But you just seem..."

"Hah!" Jack rolls his eyes, and this time some humor glints in them, undampened even by hundreds of thousands of years spent in complete isolation. "I had forever to be angry and afraid." Unspoken is, _and lonely_. 

Leaping up into the air, lazily sinking back down, Jack settles back in by his own little tree and taps its trunk, freezing it through instantly in a sheet of glittering ice. This seems to help, a little, for though he seems fully aware, Jack has still been flushed and sweaty until he presses his face lovingly into that icy bark, humming with relief. Kozmotis looks away, expecting the conversation to be over. He is frustrated by it, filled with the simple desire to understand what is happening, and why. He half-expects the Nightmares and fearlings to show up at any second and consume him all over again. It would be a fitting vengeance, he supposes, for what he put Jack Frost through, but it doesn't happen, and doesn't happen, until he begins to realize that it will not. He can imagine any number of reasons why Jack would drag him out into an isolated wilderness, most of which revolve around increasingly horrible tortures Jack might have planned for Kozmotis in retaliation to his many crimes. He can't imagine why Jack has not gotten started, and waits in fear for the moment that the mask of ennui is set aside, revealing anger or worse.

Instead, Jack's winter-soft voice breaks Kozmotis's reverie with a quiet sigh. "I miss it, sometimes. I miss the quiet."

He says, tentatively, "Me, too." and Jack smiles toothily. 

They sit together until night has fallen, and the rain has stopped, and then Jack stands, brusquely. "Come on," he says, offering one freezing hand to Pitch. Though it isn't exactly comfortable, he still has some slight resistance to the ice that Jack exudes naturally, and fortunately the fingertips that touch his own are not so frigid as all that. They stand together, hands clasped in good faith, and Kozmotis wonders, again, what it is that Jack Frost wants. If not revenge, what? If not justice, what? If not power-- power over Kozmotis, or the Nightmares, or both-- then what? "There's a cave not far that I think you'll like."

Friendship?

Such an idea had never occurred to him, before, but as soon as it does it seems obvious. Why else separate the nightmares from their first and weakest victim? Why come to Pitch at all? Why acknowledge him, why bring him here, away from the loudness and bustle of the modern world with ghastly human modern things and their light pollution and their dull roar of civilization, to the quiet? Why trust him, unless--?

Without further hesitation, Kozmotis follows.

**Author's Note:**

> Not much for notes; I kind of want to write a billion AU vignettes about Jack and free-Kozmotis. 
> 
> Also, being a resident of Arizona, I figured I would write about the huge disparity between southern AZ's climate and northern. Go, rain-shadow deserts!


End file.
